“Maybe I could bowl with all of you, then you could accompany me. It’s a new film just released called The Cop. I’d rather see it with the bona fide article like yourself. That way you can tell me what’s wrong with the film, how outrageous and impossible it is.”
By now her heart had slammed into her ribs. He was the one who was outrageous and impossible. I want to go with him more than anything I’ve ever wanted to do in my whole life.
“I’m sure the guys won’t like me tagging along,” he murmured, “but since it’s a group date, I can’t see a problem with adding one more. Unless you’re not at all interested in spending off-duty time with me.”
“Annie? Are you coming or not?”
She had no idea how long Paco had been standing there eavesdropping. His scowl was meant to intimidate, but it seemed to have the opposite effect on the man waiting for her answer.
“Ms. Forrester was just making up her mind.”
Paco’s black eyes flashed impatiently before he looked at Annabelle. “Everyone’s outside ready to take off.”
I should go with you guys. I know I should.
“Maybe you’d better go without me, Paco.”
After a pause, “All right. See you tomorrow.” He wheeled away from them and disappeared around the corner of the hallway.
“He has too short a fuse to be a police officer.”
“He’s one of the best!” she defended, furious with herself for not listening to the little voice inside telling her to end this now, before she got in over her head.
“My car’s right out front. We can go to the movie, then I’ll bring you straight back here.”
Annabelle was tempted. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t already been introduced. She’d spent all of yesterday afternoon with him looking for a bomb that didn’t exist. It had been her job to take down the background information on him as part of the paperwork. Everything she’d learned proved him to be an upstanding citizen and member of the community.
How could it hurt to go to one little movie with him before they went their separate ways for the rest of their lives?
Surely she could handle two hours while she pretended she wasn’t affected by everything he said and did, the way he moved and breathed. In the dark she could watch him out of the corner of her eye while he watched the movie. Just anticipating that pleasure made her insides melt.
“I’ve never had a date with a woman who could protect me before. It will be a novel experience.”
So that’s why he’d asked her out. His life experiences hadn’t paired him with a policewoman yet. Curiosity, not attraction, had brought him to the police station.
If it came down to who could protect whom, even with the moves she’d learned and a weapon in hand, she would place her bets on him any time of the day or night.
“A cop movie sounds like a good way to unwind. I can enjoy the chase without doing any of the work. Let me put my bag away and I’ll meet you out front. What kind of a car do you drive?”
She noted a glimmer of satisfaction in his eyes. For no particular reason it made her nervous, which was ridiculous. After all, she wouldn’t have liked it if he hadn’t been pleased she’d accepted his invitation. Face it, Annabelle. You’re hooked.
“A dark blue BMW sedan.”
What else? “I’ll be right out.”
It had only taken her a minute to stash her bag before she joined him. Because she was so used to doing everything herself even though she worked with a partner on duty, it felt nice to be treated like a woman for a little while. He opened and closed doors for her, cupped her elbow to usher her into the theater. If only her body would stop reacting to the contact.
No doubt they made an interesting sight. A big, gorgeous man escorting a little woman still dressed in uniform. While they stood in line for their tickets she noticed a lot of females staring at Rand, then more enviously at her. Annabelle would have done the same thing if she hadn’t been his date. He was really something to look at.
The film turned out to be a cliffhanger. In fact it was so good she forgot he’d brought her along to help him pick it apart afterward. Oddly enough, he didn’t appear to be nearly as involved. To her surprise, during several shoot-out scenes he dropped comments about hoping she didn’t expose herself to those kinds of dangers. At one point she heard him say that he couldn’t imagine her making police work a lifetime career.
His reaction was typical of most men when they found out what she did for a living. The women on the force had to get used to those kinds of asides to survive in a male dominated profession. She didn’t really take Rand’s comments seriously. At the time she’d thought he’d been teasing her. That had been her first mistake.
“Do you go off duty at the same time tomorrow night?” Quiet had reigned in the car until he’d pulled up next to her compact car in the station’s parking lot.
Her heart thundered out of control. “Yes.”
“Good. We’ll get a bite to eat and go bowling.”
She’d been so terrified of never seeing him again, it took her a minute to realize he wasn’t prepared to walk away yet, either.
“Have you ever been bowling?” She hated it when her voice shook like that.
“Not in years. But it doesn’t matter. I’d just as soon watch you. In fact, I’d ask you to breakfast, lunch and dinner tomorrow if I thought it were possible. When’s your next day off?”
By now her whole body was shaking, not just her voice. “Monday. But I have things I have to do.”
“So do I. We’ll do them together. I promise not to touch you until you tell me I can. I’m letting you set the pace.”
Annabelle knew exactly what he was talking about. She knew that he knew how much she wanted to touch him, to be touched by him. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. It was a revelation. Unfortunately her desire to be with him above all else had blinded her to certain unassailable truths.
He’d been deadly serious when he’d expressed his opinion about the dangers of her work and the hope that she would eventually give it up. Six weeks later, after they’d spent every conceivable moment together, he’d proposed.
When he’d put the diamond ring on her finger, he’d let her know that he expected her to have resigned from the police force by the time they were married. “I want a full-time wife, sweetheart.”
Aghast that he’d actually made such a stipulation, she spent the next week explaining what her job meant to her, how happy it made her. Why would she give it up? He had his work and loved it. Couldn’t they both do what they wanted and enjoy their marriage, too?
The more she tried to reason with him, the quieter he grew. Their relationship underwent a drastic change. At one point they agreed that dinner was a mistake and he’d driven her home without taking her in his arms.
Devastated by his reaction and desperate to get back what they’d shared, she went over to his condo that night, unannounced, offering a compromise. She would talk to the captain about working part-time.
“No,” was all Rand said, his face hardened by lines. “Don’t you understand? I don’t care if you only worked one hour a week. In that length of time you could be hurt or killed. Police work isn’t like anything else. If you loved me,” his voice grated, “you wouldn’t want to put me through torture every time you left our bed to report to your job.”
“If you loved me you’d accept it... I love what I do, Rand.”
“More than me?” he almost shouted, his eyes dark slits from the strength of turbulent emotions.
“Can’t I love both?”
“Of course. But you don’t offer me the same choice,” he bit out. “When you leave the house in the morning, there’s every chance that by the end of the day, you’ll have been shot by some lunatic. Should that happen, and statistics have proven that it will, who’s going to be in our bed to comfort me at night after a hard day’s work?”
“Don’t you have any faith in me at all?” she cried out. “I’m good at what I
do.”
“You think I don’t know that?” His hands had formed fists. “But the percentages work against you no matter how expert you are, no matter how well trained.”
Her chest heaved. “Is that your final word on the subject?”
“It is.”
“Then this is mine!”
Her pain combined with the adrenaline rushing through her body, caused her to tear the ring from her finger and throw it at him.
White-faced he’d said in a forbidding voice, “If you walk out that door on me, Annabelle, I won’t come after you and beg you to come back.”
“Did I ask you to?” she flung at him before she fled his condo in agony.
Within the week she’d thrown out every reminder of Rand. After resigning from her job, she’d made arrangements to move back to Salt Lake.
The only thing she couldn’t bring herself to part with was her mother’s wedding dress, the one Annabelle had planned to wear when she took her vows with Rand. Just a few days earlier Janet had gone to Annabelle’s house in Salt Lake and had sent the dress Express Mail.
With tears streaming down her cheeks, she’d packed it in the wardrobe part of her suitcase to take back home with her. It would remain a memento of her mother’s, nothing else.
When Annabelle finally boarded the plane, she felt shattered and broken. Her world had exploded and nothing would ever be the same again.
Rand stayed where he was, preferring to watch the expert way she handled the cycle in spite of her small size. It had been a long time since he’d been able to feast his eyes on her alluring body.
A pocket Venus. That’s what he’d thought of her the first time he’d met her dressed in a police officer’s uniform. Everything was there in exquisite abundance, in all the right places. Just sort of in miniature. Amazing.
In her boots she stood about as high as his heart. Her heavily lashed eyes glowed a greenish-yellow color like those of a calico cat. She possessed a generous mouth and a cap of curly auburn curls he had to resist tousling. Her small hands fascinated him. Hell. Everything about her fascinated him.
She’d been part of the bomb squad which had arrived on the scene after Roman’s private secretary had received a bomb threat. In surprisingly short order Annabelle had determined the scare to be a hoax.
Adorable beyond belief, he discovered her intelligence and humor to be as intriguing as her looks. He’d never met a woman like her. She had a mind of her own and could have cared less about his money. Her advent into his world changed his life.
An elusive creature, he started out right away to pursue her in earnest. During the chase scene at the first movie they’d gone to together, he’d fallen in love with her and had never recovered.
Much as he might want to catch up with her now and give her a run for her money on his newly purchased Kawasaki, he decided that would be pushing it. Better to give her five minutes of lead rope before he slowly tightened the noose.
There was no doubt in his mind that he was definitely going to tighten the noose.
Twelve months ago, when she’d thrown the engagement ring in his face and walked out on him, his pride couldn’t take it. He’d told himself he was better off without a woman who didn’t need him or anything he had to offer.
She could stay married to her career as a policewoman and go to an early grave with nothing to show for it but a bullet in her back. He’d convinced himself that he didn’t care what she did.
For the last year he had immersed himself in work, expanding his company with a speed his board of directors could scarcely handle. Staying hellishly busy staved off the pain. Until he’d left for Salt Lake, Caroline had been there to provide a feminine distraction.
But now he realized she had been a mistake. He should never have gone out with her in the first place. Six months after his breakup with Annabelle, they’d met at a mutual friend’s pool party. She’d made it clear she’d like to see more of him. Though he found her attractive and interesting, he told her up front that he didn’t believe in love and had no intention of getting serious with any woman.
She immediately assured him that she wasn’t looking for commitment, only companionship. She, too, preferred an open-ended relationship. Both of them could go and come as they pleased, date other people at any time, no questions asked.
He’d taken her at a word and they’d started seeing each other casually.
But when he called Caroline from his Phoenix office and told her he was leaving for Salt Lake on business for an indefinite period, she’d treated him to the emotional side of her nature.
In a tearful outburst she admitted she was in love with him. Then she accused him of not loving her the way she loved him or he would have asked her to go to Salt Lake with him.
For some time his subconscious had sensed she was getting too involved. He should have done something about it sooner, but he’d been too driven by the pain of Annabelle’s rejection to act on those instincts.
At that point he confessed that he was in love with someone else and had been for a long time. He was sorry if he’d hurt Caroline. Under the circumstances this separation was for the best. He hoped she would be able to forgive him and get on with her life.
As for Rand, he could no longer deny the truth to himself or anyone else. Annabelle was his heart and soul. If the Fates were kind, he would get her back in his life for good.
On that note he gave his bike more gas, his thoughts flicking to the angry customers out there ready to vent their spleen on the powers that be at Dunbarton’s. After arriving in Salt Lake and talking to his manager, Rand had hired a local telephone engineer to hook up a phone line which could be patched through to the main office where he was working alone.
The service people on duty for Dunbarton’s had no idea he was in town, let alone what was going on. He could imagine their surprise at such a quiet night, especially when there would be no explanation for it.
So far he’d answered fifteen calls, eleven of them complaints about the wretched way they’d been treated on Dunbarton’s software lines within the last week. Naturally he wasn’t about to let any of those patrons know they weren’t alone in their frustration.
The criminal out there doing his best to ruin Rand’s company had already created minor havoc in the Salt Lake region. To Rand’s chagrin he wouldn’t be able to put out any fires, not until he had answers to several questions. Chief among them was whether the hacker worked independently or was part of a ring intent on infiltrating his company which had service centers from coast to coast.
He supposed the person responsible could have picked Dunbarton’s on a whim, but Rand couldn’t help wondering if it wasn’t a troubled former employee who had been let go from the Salt Lake service center at one time or other and was out for revenge.
That kind of retaliation was common enough. Just tonight the headlines in the Salt Lake Tribune had announced Utah Steel’s plan to lay off several hundred employees. Two hours later all the TV channels were covering a warehouse fire on Utah Steel’s property. So far an estimated million dollars in damage had been done by a pipe bomb.
As far as Rand knew, there had been no sign of trouble at any other Dunbarton plants in the country, but he wasn’t ruling out that possibility, and had his top people working on the problem right now.
Much as he hated to admit it, Salt Lake could be the first in a series of problems. That was one of the reasons he was here. To get a handle on what was going on and begin damage control.
But if the truth be known, he’d come for Annabelle. He’d never gotten her out of his system. When word came that the Salt Lake customer service center was having problems, Rand had leaped at the chance to fly here himself.
For the first time in a year he actually exulted over the trouble in his company because it provided him with a legitimate excuse to see her again.
Through a mutual friend on the Phoenix police force, he found out she’d gone to work in Salt Lake as a PI. While on the plane he came up wit
h the plan to hire her to help solve the crisis. He was desperately in love with her and always would be. No matter how long it took, or what he had to go through, one day she would be his wife.
If she needed a dangerous career to make her happy, then so be it. That issue was no longer important as long as they could be together. Asking her to collaborate on his case would prove that he had changed, that he accepted her desire to work at a high-risk job because it made her happy.
But wanting her back and getting her back were two different things. She’d had a year to harden. Softening her up wasn’t going to be easy. Today would set the tone for the way things were going to go until she ran willingly into his arms once more.
He had no idea how long it would take, but he recognized that infinite patience would play the key role in obtaining his heart’s desire. Rand couldn’t afford to make one wrong move. Otherwise he’d lose the only thing that truly mattered to him...
He waited until she was out of sight, then headed toward the main highway. When he reached the turnoff, he opened up. Before long he was passing a lot of semitrucks and the occasional four-wheel drive full of teenagers anxious to get in some late spring skiing.
As his cycle ate up the miles, the cool mountain air cleared his lungs and his head. He experienced a feeling of well-being. Annabelle had the right idea. Nature had a way of putting things into perspective.
Whether. she liked it or not, she was part of that perspective.
At the thought, a sly smile broke out on his face and stayed there all the way to the old mining town of Park City which had been turned into a playground for the rich and famous.
The place seemed crowded, even for a weekday. Two blocks up the main street and he spied her BMW parked between two vans in front of the Dairy Freeze.
Rand rode around the corner and found a spot for his cycle. Wedging his helmet under his arm, he strode across the street. The local hamburger stand appeared to be a favorite retreat for teenagers.
After a cursory glance, he found her in the last booth and took the seat opposite her. “I ordered for both of us when I first came in,” she announced. “Two bacon deluxes, French fries and a chocolate malt. I hope that’s what you wanted.”
Undercover Fiancee Page 3
